We're on TeeVee!

The store was featured on Fox 41 last night, after all that tornado stuff. This blogger was a little sad not get her 15 minutes, but alas we can't get everything.

If that link thing feels like too much work, you can just watch the clip below!

Year 150

You may or may not have noticed, but this year marks Heimerdinger Cutlery's 150th Anniversary! We have all sorts of in-store events (cake!), in-store sales, and yes we'll even have some things for you guys here on the internet. And did I mention the cake? Yum. Keep your eyes on this space for more info to come.

Now, we can't be entirely certain that 1861 was the year that the Store was founded, but it's a good guess. Why? Because it was the first year that it appeared in the Louisville City Directory, showing up as A. Heimerdinger--Cutler and Sewing Machine Repair.  We know it couldn't have been founded too many years previous to that because August originally settled in Cincinnati, where he was married in 1857.  His movement to Louisville can be tracked by birth records; in 1859 he had one daughter born in the Cincinnati area and another daughter was born in 1860 in Louisville. Gotta love genealogy.

Want to know more about our history? Check out my blog post here, or the website here. Sorry about the broken pictures, they were on the old website and so went away when it did. I can't find the digital files and I don't really feel like dangling off a ladder again to take new pics. You'll just have to wait for me to find a flatbed scanner. I'm sure you're just dying of antici...pation.

History Lesson

I'm snowed in today, so I have plenty of time to write a post for you guys. I thought you might be interested in a little bit about the history of the cutlery. Maybe you've already checked out Uncle Carl's version from our original website or the newer version on the current website, ore you remember the tidbits I've mentioned before, but I thought I'd combine it all and give you my version.

August E. Heimerdinger was our founder, and my great-great-great grandfather. Heimerdinger's first appeared in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, sometime around 1861. That's the first on-paper mention my grandfather found of the store, which at that point was located at 110 Jefferson Street. There, he made scissors and butcher knives, and repaired sewing machines. August was born in Germany, and had just a ton of children from two different wives.

Family legend has it that August moved into a shop next to a woodworker by the name of Hillerich. Mr. Hillerich had a steam engine that he used used to run his woodworking tools. Old man August wanted to run his grinding wheels but didn't have a steam engine, and so the two of them worked out an arrangement. They cut a hole in the wall and ran a flat belt through the wall so that August could run his grinding wheels. That company became Hillerich and Bradsby, who is best known for making Louisville Slugger baseball bats.

After his death, his son W.C. Heimerdinger took control of the business. He added a full line of butcher supplies; branching out into barber and beauty supplies during the 1920's. The Droescher company, in Germany, manufactured scissors and grinding wheels for the store during this time period.
W.C. also held at least 5 patents, for various things from safety knives and razors to a machine for making shears. The most interesting, to me anyway, was a machine designed to sharpen razors, specifically what were then considered to be disposable razorblades. This got the attention of a certain Mister Gillette, whose company still sells razors today. The lawsuit he brought against W.C. was eventually settled, and the sharpeners were fairly widely produced. Just a few years ago, someone found one in an old shop. They thought we might like to have it; now it resides in my grandparents' basement, still able to sharpen razorblades even though it was designed over a century ago.

W.C.'s son, W.G. Heimerdinger, took over the business around 1920, though if W.C. was anything like my grandfather, he stuck around for years even though he had "retired." In 1922, W.G. incorporated the business and discontinued the scissor manufacturing. At that time he began manufacturing grass shears, pruning shears, hedge shears, mule shears, and sheep shears, which were sold through the Sears catalog. W.G. also held several patents, including the original patent on grass shears. My favorite is for an ice cream scoop, though I don't know that it was ever widely manufactured. Along with all of this, W.G.decided to start another division of Heimerdinger's and moved into hardware.

The manufacturing part of the business ended in the mid 1950’s, although we still re-manufacture and sharpen scissors, knives, and many other types of edged tools. The hardware part of the business ended during the mid 1960’s. (Remember all those bolts I told you about? Yeah, they've been sitting around for that long. Purely amazing.)

My grandfather attended what was then Speed Sceintific School, now the Speed School of Engineering. He finished his bachelors of engineering in two and a half years, interrupted by a stint in the Army during WWII. Henry w. Heimerdinger entered into the business in 1947, during the hardware phase. Throughout our history, the business has always sold many types of scissors as well as kitchen and pocket knives. This always interested my grandfather, so he spun a separate company off of W.C. Heimerdinger in 1969, forming Heimerdinger Cutlery Inc.
Around this time, Henry's older brother, Billy, took over the barber/beauty supply end of the business. You didn't think they'd gotten tired of naming everyone William ___ had you? Nope, in that generation the tradition held strong. After the death of his father, Billy left to pursue another line of business, eventually ending up down in sunny Florida.
While my grandfather never held any patents, he did have considerable ingenuity. He designed the grinding wheels that we use today to sharpen items that people bring into the store. Up until this past year, even after "retiring" in 1991, he still came into the store once or twice a week to putter around in the shop, sharpening knives and taking apart scissors.


In 1983, Heimerdinger Cutlery moved from downtown Louisville out to Shelbyville Road, just before I was born. As previously mentioned, my grandfather "retired" in 1991, leaving the business in the hands of the firth general, my uncle Carl E. Heimerdinger.
In 1993, my aunt, Glenna Fahle Heimerdinger, joined the company as Vice President. She took over a lot of the accounting-type stuff, which she did part-time while raising my cousin, Nicole (who has always been a full-time occupation).

You might ask where I fit into things. My father, David, was Henry's younger son (Carl's younger brother). While the engineering genes were strong with him, the desire to stay with the business wasn't. With Uncle Carl, my father grew up working at the store; starting at the youngest age with sweeping up and going on to being left in charge while my grandparents were on vacation. From what I hear, they only had to call an ambulance once before my grandparents came home. My father now has a career doing safety engineering, but he still remembers all the things one learns from working in a cutlery. (I'll have to do a post on that one...)
Anyway, I'm the oldest of the three of us in the sixth generation. (My brother doesn't like blood, so it's good that he never worked at the store). I started working at the store on the weekends, during my junior and senior year of high school. I worked closer to full time during the summers-- then, and later during college. And as you know, I started doing this blog a little over a year ago.


That brings us up to present. Hope that helped you kill a few minutes pleasantly on this grey, icky, freezing day.
Also, you better appreciate those pictures, because I had to climb up on a ladder to take them.

Lions and Tigers and Bolts, oh my!

You might have noticed that we are having some inventory reduction sales. You might also have noticed that some of the things on sale are not things that you would ordinarily think of the Cutlery as carrying.

These would be keen observations.

Meat grinder plates make sense, but Dremel tool accessories and files/rifflers make a little less sense. Bolts... yeah, those seem like a mystery.

The rifflers/files and Dremel accessories make sense if you know my grandfather. He's very into making things with his hands. Lots of woodwork and he did scrimshaw for a while. The bolts have a different story.

These bolts are leftover stock from the Heimerdinger company when it was still a hardware store in downtown Louisville. As you might know, our family business dates back to 1861, and over time has included things like manufacturing of scissors, shears, and knives. This went on until the mid 50's (and we still have several pounds of leftover blanks for shears if someone is doing a historical project). Anyway, from the 1920's to the mid 60's, the store was primarily a hardware store. These bolts and things have been in storage since Heimerdinger Cutlery moved to Shelbyville Road in 1983.

Because of their age, the bolts aren't the sort you'll find at the hardware store today. (Or so I have been told. I don't go hang out at Home Depot, or anything).
These bolts are mostly black iron (aka, not galvanized, not stainless, etc.) and mostly they are carriage bolts, machine bolts, and stove bolts. A lot of them have rolled threads (meaning the hot metal was rolled on something to give it threads, instead of having them cut into the metal).
They might be of interest to people doing restoration, or reenactment, who are very into authenticity. Maybe some SCA people out there?

Nancy (the employee in charge of the website) will keep adding more bolts and things as time allows. I'll be posting a mostly complete list at some point. However, feel free to contact us if you want to ask about specific sizes.


Probably the most fun I had while I was working at the store during highschool was rummaging through the old hardware store stuff in the shop. It was a blast, I found all sorts of fun things: glass bubble things for levels, a manual hair clipper, old key-making machines, and just tons of things. Oh, and did I mention the barrel filled with nails?

"Staying Sharp"

The above is the title of an article about Heimerdinger Cutlery that was published in the Voice Tribune, Wednesday, July 30th. Here's a link to the article so you can read it for yourself!

Matthew Ralph came to the store with his photographer and they interviewed Carl, Glenna, and their daughter (my cousin) Nicole.

Here's a couple of excerpts:

Over the course of 147 years, Heimerdinger Cutlery Co. has sold thousands of knives and scissors – and even a few refrigerators along the way.

Since its establishment in 1861 by the son of a German tailor, the one constant in the Heimerdinger name has been innovation.

Unlike some of his ancestors, Carl E. Heimerdinger doesn’t hold patents on elaborate sharpening or cutting devices or run an elaborate manufacturing facility, but his decision to invest in e-commerce six years ago was just as innovative in terms of keeping the St. Matthews business afloat...

Today, purchases through the company’s elaborate Web catalog – heimerdingercutlery.com – account for about 50 percent of sales.

That’s good news for Nicole Heimerdinger, Carl’s gregarious 14-year-old daughter who knows the store like the back of her hand and likes the sound of “sixth generation business owner.”

Yeah, keep up that internet business, so I can keep blogging for your delight and entertainment! Or is that laying it on too thick?

Though the company has moved several times since it opened in a downtown storefront in the 19th century – moving to its current location at 4207 Shelbyville Road 25 years ago – reminders of the Heimerdinger legacy are always looming overhead in photographs of the past owners and a large pair of golden shears Carl’s father carved in the early 1920s. The shears used to hang outside the Market Street shop.

A refrigerator label from the early 1900s hangs on the wall as a reminder of some of the interesting items the company sold through the years...

“It’s very unique and very exciting being part of a business that’s been in the family so long,” Carl said. “There’s all of this history behind you.”

Even for those of us who aren't in line to own the business someday, the history is still strong. I started working in the store my junior year of high school, when I needed to earn some money for a school trip. I went in on Saturdays; a few years later I worked full time in the summer.

The store has always been a part of who I am. My dad brought me in when I was too young to see over the counters, when the most marvelous thing in the store was the tray full of Swiss Army knives, each in their own little section. The rows of gleaming knives in the display cases are paired with the whir of machinery from back in the shop where my grandfather and uncle were sharpening things. The sounds the displaycase doors make when someone slides them open and the challenge of climbing on to the tall stools behind the counter are an integral part of my memories of spending the weekend with my grandparents.

(It should be capitalized, "The Store." That's how we all think of it, and that's how everyone in the family uses it. In our address books, in conversation, even in my cell phone, that building is what we mean when we say "The Store.")

Even though I don't work in The Store regularly, and haven't for two or three years, I am still involved. The most obvious way is through this blog. But I can look at the website and see photos that I either took or assisted with. If you see a disembodied woman's hand on the website, it's most likely mine. During the holiday season or summer, if extra help is needed and I'm in town, I'll come in. I enjoy going to visit, talking with the people who work there, getting to play with new knives and things.

Some things you can't get away from, they're in your blood. Luckily, I love being a part of The Store.

State of the Store Address

There have been a lot of changes at the store in the past few months.

One of the biggest is the permanent retirement of Henry Heimerdinger, the former owner of the store (and my grandfather). He handed control of the business over to Carl in 1991 and semi-retired. Despite that, he still came in a few days a week to help with sharpening items customers brought in (mostly knives, scissors, and gardening tools). His last day was the twenty-ninth of August.

Another big change at around that time was that the clipper repair room was converted into a shipping room. The room has its own computer workstation and plenty of counter space for organizing and wrapping shipments. We've been getting enough online business that Carl decided we needed to dedicate some space to it. Never fear, we still repair clippers and supply repair parts for you to fix it yourself.

Since we lost the elder Mr. Heimerdinger's work back in the shop, we hired a new employee who has been trained in the fine skill of sharpening knives by hand. An interesting note is that some of the grinding wheels used in the shop had their design adapted particularly for this purpose by Henry Heimerdinger, who is a graduate of UofL's Speed School of Engineering. They work as well today as they did twenty years ago.